July marks the one year anniversary of the end of Robert Kirkman's The Walking Dead comic book series. One year after the series reached an unexpected conclusion with issue #193, it's getting a one-shot follow-up called Negan Lives!
Negan Lives! is a comic shop exclusive that was "conceived to aid comic book stores recovering from the shutdown due to the pandemic crisis", and it allows Kirkman to give readers a proper goodbye to the Negan character, who had been absent from the final issues of the series. 100% of the revenue generated will go to the outlets selling the comic.
Kirkman wrote the thirty-six page comic, with Walking Dead artist Charlie Adlard returning to handle the artwork. Kirkman told Syfy Wire,
It was kind of fun getting the band back together and doing a sendoff for Negan in a way that we weren’t able to do in the final issue because at that point we weren’t really focusing on Negan. He’d already been kind of capped off. It’s a fun thing to come back to, but it’s definitely a very special one-off story and we’re not planning on doing anything else with it after this."
Coming from Skybound Entertainment and Image Comics, Negan Lives! will reach comic shop shelves this Wednesday, July 1st.
I think it's very cool that Kirkman and Adlard have done this to benefit comic shops, so I hope it will sell well.